Mark Kelly: Gabrielle Giffords and I will do 'whatever it takes' for gun control

The gun control crowd is about to have a powerful and compelling new lobbyist on Capitol Hill: Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).

Giffords, who was nearly killed in a shooting rampage in Tucson two years ago, resigned her seat in the House a year ago Friday. She hasn’t decided whether she’ll actually register as a lobbyist yet — a move she can make now that the one-year “cooling off” period is expiring — but she will represent her new outfit, Americans for Responsible Solutions, in pushing Congress to enact new gun-control laws.

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“We need to get Congress to act on this issue,” Giffords’ husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, told POLITICO in an interview on Thursday evening. Kelly and Giffords partnered up to form Americans for Responsible Solutions, which has a a super PAC arm and a lobbying arm.

The aim of the sister organizations is to lobby members of Congress to vote for gun control — and then reward friends and punish enemies on the campaign trail. Whether Giffords and Kelly will appear in districts, or in campaign ads, remains to be seen, as they’re still trying to figure out the intricacies of campaign and lobbying laws. But if it’s within the law, they’ll do it, they say.

“Gabby and I are prepared to do whatever it takes,” Kelly said.

Giffords and Kelly describe themselves as gun-owning moderates — a distinction they believe will help them persuade elected officials and voters to support universal background checks, limitations on the ammunition capacity of clips and other legislative proposals.

“Gabby and I come from a little bit of a different place” than traditional liberal gun-control advocates, Kelly said.

Neither Kelly nor Giffords jumped into the gun-control debate in the aftermath of the Tuscon massacre, in which the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, killed six people and put a bullet through Giffords’ brain. Giffords was focused on her recovery and Kelly was ensconced in that and preparation for his final spaceflight.

But at the sentencing hearing for Loughner, Kelly made clear where they stood.

“We have a political class that is afraid to do something as simple as have a meaningful debate about our gun laws and how they are being enforced. We have representatives who look at gun violence, not as a problem to solve, but as the white elephant in the room to ignore,” he said. “As a nation we have repeatedly passed up the opportunity to address this issue. After Columbine; after Virginia Tech; after Tucson and after Aurora, we have done nothing.”

The killing of 20 first-graders in a Newtown, Conn., school late last year was like “getting hit in the head with a 2-by-4,” Kelly said. That’s what moved them to start the new SuperPAC, which received its first million-dollar donation earlier this month.

“We’re going to have all the money we need to play in every relevant race, in ‘13 and ‘14 and beyond,” said Pia Carusone, who is executive director of both organizations.